Sunday, May 28, 2017

I featured The
Reluctant Fundamentalist film a few weeks ago as one of my “Movies for
Readers.”At the time, I mentioned that
I had not read the book upon which the film is based but that I intended soon
to do something about that so that I could compare the two.As it turns out there is a huge plot
variation in the movie that almost exemplifies the stereotypical relationship
between books and the movies that Hollywood turns them into.

Both the novel and movie versions of The Reluctant Fundamentalist focus on a central character, a
Pakistani by the name of Changez, as the man tells his life story to an
American while the pair sits together at a table inside a Lahore café.Changez tells the stranger about his
education at a prestigious American university, and how that education resulted
in a New York City job that was coveted by all of his fellow
graduating-students.

Just as he had risen to the top of his graduating class,
Changez did the same in his new job at Underwood Samson, a company considered
by those in the know to be the best “valuation firm” in the business.His future seemed to be unlimited – at least,
that is, until 9-11.After the murders
of 9-11, Changez experienced the same backlash felt by so many other Muslim
ex-pats living in the West. Almost overnight, Changez and those who looked like
him were viewed with a combination of suspicion and spite.It did not matter who they were, where they
went to school, or where they worked; they were dark-skinned Muslims and that was
enough to make them easy targets on the streets of the city.

Even Changez’s Underwood Samson colleagues treated him
differently than they had before the 9-11 murders occurred.Changez understood exactly what was happening
to him, and even though he understood why
it was happening, he resented it.And
when he decided to grow a beard as a symbolic expression of the anger and
resentment he felt, Changez found the perfect look and image to place an even
larger target on his own back.So now
the two men sit in Lahore, Pakistan, and it seems that neither of them is
particularly happy to be there.Changez
seems to know a lot about the American and what he must be thinking, but the
man hardly speaks or much acknowledges the observations with which Changez
continuously challenges him.

Keep in mind that this 184-page novel is one long monologue
that does not end even at the end of the book when Changez, near midnight, is
walking the American to his hotel.Everything the American feels or says is delivered to the reader only in
the reflection of what Changez says in response to what he sees and hears from
the man.

The movie, on the other hand, uses multiple flashbacks to
help Changez tell his story and to show a kidnapping that happened in Lahore a
day or two earlier.The movie makes very
clear why these two men are uneasily sharing a table – something the book is
much less clear about.It is easy to see
that the novel serves as the skeleton around which the movie is built, but it
is also easy to understand why the film scriptwriter needed to make some major
editions to the novel’s plot in order to transform it into a film that viewers
would pay to see.

Bottom Line: This is one of those relatively rare cases
where the movie is actually better than the book – but both versions of The Reluctant Fundamentalist can be
enjoyed as standalones from each other (I do, however, recommend reading the
book before watching the movie).On a
five-star scale, I give the movie four stars and the book three.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

If you liked Elizabeth
Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (and
almost everyone who read it had good things to say about it), you are going to
absolutely love Strout’s follow-up, Anything Is Possible.My Name Is Lucy Barton largely took place
in Lucy’s hospital room while she and her mother talked about people they both
knew from the little town in which the Bartons lived.If the Bartons were not the poorest family in
town, they were certainly among the
very poorest, and Lucy and her mother largely judged their neighbors as a
reflection of how those people treated them and the rest of the Barton family.
That, however, does not mean that their assessments of those they discussed
were always the same, leaving the reader to wonder sometimes which of their
characterizations was the most accurate.

Elizabeth Strout

In Anything Is Possible, Strout fills in the backstories of many of
the characters Lucy and her mother discussed in that hospital room.And because Strout has revealed that she more
or less wrote the two novels simultaneously, Anything Is Possible is even more intriguing than it already would
have been.This time around, the author uses
a group of what at first appear to be a collection of standalone short stories
that turn out to be so interrelated that they morph into an even more
satisfying novel than Lucy Barton was.And that is saying a lot.

There are stories about
Lucy’s mother, her siblings, one mentally-unstable Vietnam War veteran, some of
the town’s richest residents, and several others from Lucy’s past.Lucy herself makes an appearance in a story
titled “Sister” in which we learn that the trauma of growing up dirt poor as
member of a family looked down upon by the whole town has emotionally crippled
her for life.Lucy, now a well-respected
novelist, seems caught between two worlds when she finally pays her hometown a
visit after several years of absence – so much so, in fact, that she suffers a
panic attack of sorts that has her fleeing Amgash in pure desperation to escape
the childhood memories being there stirs up for her.

Bottom Line: Anything Is Possible works beautifully
as a stand-alone novel for readers who have not read My Name Is Lucy Barton, but the novel’s special beauty comes from
how much it adds to the reader’s understanding of the events and characters in Lucy Barton.This is literary fiction at its best, and it is not to be missed.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Arnaldur Indridason’s Reykjavik
Nights (published in the US in 2015) is billed as a prequel to the author’s
popular Inspector Erlendur series.As
such, it offers fans of the series a fascinating look at a very young Erlendur
just as he begins his career as a member of the Reykjavik police department.

Although young Erlendur’s responsibilities are mostly those
of a traffic cop as he works the night shift with his two partners, his
curiosity about what happens on his city’s streets is already transforming him
into the dogged investigator he will one day be.Erlendur is not the kind of man who can turn
his back on those whose bad habits have condemned them to a precarious life on
Reykjavik’s cold streets.Despite the
resistance of many of those he tries to help, the young traffic division cop always
tries to leave them in better shape the he finds them.Erlendur sees the homeless as individuals,
not simply as a long series of drunkards or mentally ill people to be dealt
with on his shift and then quickly forgotten.He remembers their faces and their names and tries to connect with them
in as positive a way as the situation allows him.

A man named Hannibal is one of the hopelessly addicted
alcoholics whom Erlendur has dealt with more than once, even to letting the man
shelter in a jail cell one particularly cold night when there was room to spare
in the jail (something he has been known to do for others in similar
circumstances and conditions).Something
about Hannibal intrigues Erlendur, something about his personality that hints
how seriously the man has been damaged by something in his past.Erlendur wonders if it is too late to save
the man from himself.

Arnaldur Indridason

But that will never be, because three boys paddling their
makeshift boat down one of the city’s tiny waterways soon discover Hannibal’s drowned
body floating there.For Erlendur, the
worst thing about Hannibal’s sad end is that no one seems to care.The police are quick to write his dearth off
as an accidental drowning; the man’s street friends are not concerned with the
details of his death; and the world will soon forget that Hannibal ever
existed.Erlendur, however is not so
ready to forget Hannibal and starts asking questions, lots of them, during his
off-duty hours – questions that lead to an entirely off-the-books investigation
that will find Erlendur risking his own future by keeping what he learns from
his superiors in the department, including the very investigators who would
most profit from learning what Erlendur discovers.

Reykjavik Nights will
be particularly enjoyable for readers already familiar with the Inspector
Erlendur character because the author has clearly built the young traffic cop
from elements of the man readers know the mature Inspector now to be.It is all there:

·Erlendur is not a man who enjoys drinking

·Staying in alone to read, listen to the radio,
or play his jazz records is much to Erlendur’s taste.

·He prefers to eat plain, traditional food and
saves even roast lamb for special occasions.

·He is intrigued by books about people who have
gone missing but have beaten incredible odds to find safety once again – and
her reads them over and over again.

·Not nocturnal by nature, he has nevertheless
come to enjoy the relative silence and isolation of Reykjavik at night.

·And, most importantly of all, Erlendur himself
is a man severely damaged by the disappearance of his childhood brother during
a blizzard whiteout.

Reykjavik Nights is
far from a perfect crime novel.It is,
in fact, a rather plodding one that despite is relatively short 295 pages seems
to take forever to reach its conclusion.Still, this is definitely one that Inspector Erlendur fans need to read
if they are to completely know and understand the character.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Elmore Leonard published novels for parts of
seven decades (1953-2012) and more than twenty of his books were made into
theatrical or television movies.Leonard
began his career writing westerns but turned to crime fiction, the genre for
which he is best known today, in the 1960s.By the time Pagan Babies was
published in 2000, Leonard (who died in 2013 at age 87) had begun to slow his
pace considerably but did later have great success with work that was turned
into the television series Justified.

Pagan Babies exhibits many
of the traits that Elmore Leonard fans have come to love over the author’s long
career. It is filled with long, quirky conversations that do as much to develop
the novel’s characters – and even the plot – as anything else Leonard has to
say about them.As is usually the case
with Leonard, the plot moves along quickly but is subject to veering to the
left or right at short notice because of the sheer ineptness of some of the
novel’s characters.Elmore Leonard never
seemed to have a very high opinion of the average intelligence of the criminal
population, and it shows again in Pagan
Babies.

For reasons best kept to himself, Father Terry Dunn decides to leave
his Rwanda church and return to his hometown of Detroit.That he witnessed the massacre by machete of
forty-seven church members during his last Mass, and that the bodies are still
inside the church weeks later, does have more than a little to do with his
decision, but it does not tell the whole story.Now, despite having left Detroit five years earlier under a tax-fraud
indictment, Father Dunn is willing to take his chances there.So armed with scores of pictures of Rwandan
orphans and mutilated bodies, he comes home hoping to dodge the tax-fraud indictment
and raise a little money for the orphans.

Elmore Leonard

But is Terry Dunn really a priest?He certainly doesn’t convince the two main women in his life at the
moment, his sister-in-law and Debbie Dewey, a woman who sometimes works for his
brother.In Terry Dunn, Debbie Dewey
(who has just completed a three-year sentence for aggravated assault) sees a
kindred spirit.And she may just be
right because Terry seems to feel the same way about her.So when Debbie explains her plan to recover
the $67,000 her ex-boyfriend stole from her, the pair joins forces in a
complicated scheme they hope will net each of them considerably more than that
amount.

Remember, though, that this
is an Elmore Leonard novel and soon enough a whole cast of dimwits is going to
appear just in time to gum up the works, including Mutt, perhaps the dumbest
hit-man in the history of crime fiction (and my favorite character in the
book).

Pagan Babies may not quite
be Elmore Leonard in his prime, but it is still a damn fine crime novel.Take a look.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Mohsin Hamid’s latest
novel, Exit West, considers the
plight of the thousands of modern refugees being forced to flee their homes by
internal violence that has become the new normal in so many countries around
the world in recent years.As their
countries succumb to political and religious civil wars, hundreds of thousands
of people flee their homelands with nothing but the clothes on their backs and
whatever little they can carry with them.Hamid focuses on two young people, Saeed and Nadia, who are forced to
run for their lives before it is too late – but he gives his story one surreal
little twist.

Much like Colin Whitehead
did in The Underground Railroad,
Hamid interprets the escape mechanism of his refugees literally.Whitehead’s Underground Railroad was
literally underground, complete with train stations and tunnels that connected
certain cites in the South with those further north.Hamid’s characters cross borders by using
literal doors that magically appear in buildings all over the world.Those crossing the thresholds of the doors
have no idea what country they will magically step out into until they arrive,
but the transportation is instantaneous.And, as long as the doors remain “open,” anything is possible.Some refugees, at least for a while, even go
back and forth through the doors in order to bring supplies back to family members
who prefer to remain in their home country.

Mohsin Hamid

Saeed and Nadia live in
an unnamed country that is falling apart before their eyes.The young Muslims are not married and have to
be very careful about how they conduct themselves in public - and even in the
privacy of their own homes – if they are to continue to fly under the radar of
militant Muslims who would gladly punish them for their “sins.”Marriage is not practical under the
circumstances, and when Saeed and Nadia step through their first door out of the
country, they do so single.

That first door opens
into Greece, but for many reasons, Greece will not be the last stop for Saeed
and Nadia.Native populations resent
being overrun by refugees whose cultures are so different from theirs, and
violent clashes with police and private citizens become more and more common as
refugee populations grow in number.The
two decide to move on, finding things to be much the same whichever country
they step into, and the constant search for food and medical care adds to the
fear of violence that Saeed and Nadia already feel.Before long, their relationship begins to
suffer under the stress, and neither seems to have the will to fix the problem.

Although Exit West is told from the refugee
point-of-view, Hamid does not paint a black or white picture of his characters based
upon which side of the border from which they originate.Not all refugees are good people; not all
citizens of the receiving countries are bad.The author chose to focus on the mindsets of his characters, and the use
of magic portals to get them instantly from one country to the next allows him
to do just that.Exit West, while not exactly an eye-opener, is a moving novel that
deserves to be read.

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